Posted by Bob Trezona on Jun 4th 2017

Rear Cinches: Are They Necessary?

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View of a rear cinch that is improperly used. This could be dangerous

Well if this review turns out anything like this day has gone I wouldn’t really want to read a whole bunch more from me but lets give it a try and see if we can’t at least get you to think a little bit about the subject.

If you have read my previous posts I won’t have to explain too much about my beliefs that all people were gifted with good old common sense but it just depends on the person whether they’re going to use it or not. So let’s do some thinking. Do you or should you be using a rear cinch?

Blog pic 2Lets look at what a rear cinch does first off. In most cases all it does is hold the saddle down on the horses’ back. Why would a saddle want to raise off of a horse’s back with you sitting in it? OK you don’t have to be a full time cowman or a Buckaroo or a horse trainer to answer this question, all you have to do is just think!! The only three things that come to mind for me is #1 your tree doesn’t fit your horse. #2 your saddle is rigged in the wrong position for the horse you’re riding. #3 you have a rope dallied off to your horn and the critter that you’re hooked onto is pulling away from your horse. So if you fall into category #3 you really don’t need to read any more because you know that you need a rear cinch and you sure don’t need me telling you that you don’t, but if you’re really interested in whether or not you still need one, just be brave and read on.

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Let’s start with the first two groups. Most riders haven’t a clue if the tree in their saddle fits their horse properly and a lot of riders wouldn’t care even if they did as long as the horse would put up with the discomfort and they could complete their ride. I might add that I’ve been building saddles for a bit more than 30 years now and it’s not an easy task to figure out if a completed saddle fits a horse’s back properly. I can teach a third grader to fit a bare tree to a horse in 5 minutes and you can be sure that it will fit but a completed saddle is a different story. Now lets say that your saddle tree does fit your horse properly but it’s not rigged in the right position for your horse. What’s going to happen if the rigging is too far forward and you tighten you cinch? Due to the rock in the bars on your saddle, it’s going to pull the front down and lift the back of the saddle off of the horse’s back. So what are you going to do? You could just tighten your rear cinch and pull it down. Problem solved, right? Well it might be solved for you but I guarantee it’s not solved for the horse.

Most folks have no idea what a bare tree looks like because 90-95% of the riders out there are riding factory made saddles and they just go to the local feed store or tack store and buy whatever catches their fancy or some really try hard to look at the specs on a saddle and figure out what will work for them and their horse.

I guess I should mention right now that most every saddle you look at will have a rear cinch on it. If it comes with one you should use it, right? OK now, your common sense is just screaming and want’s to be heard but you have to learn, like all new things, to listen to it.

Lets compare the bars on your tree to the rockers on a rocking chair. Now lets take a couple of ropes about a foot long and some fence staples and a hammer and move everything to your hardwood floor in your living room. Now make two loops with the ropes by stapling the ropes to the floor so the front of the two feet on your rocking chair will just slide into these if you really rock the chair up on its nose. Now remove the chair from the loops and put about six more staples on each end of your short ropes that make the loops so they’re really solid and won’t come undone no matter what.

By now I’m sure your common sense is trying to tell you something, maybe it’s just that it was rather stupid to try this experiment on your nice hard wood floor in the house and it would of worked just as well out in the barn. So, back to our experiment.

Take your chair and tip it up and slide the front tips of the rocking feet into the loops that you made, now it should look somewhat like the saddle on your horse. OK, now lets put our safety glasses on so we don’t lose an eye during this experiment. We’re going to pretend that you weigh about 150 pounds and that you could be a man or a women, now go around to the back of the chair and very carefully step up on the rear of the legs that are sticking way up in the air.

By now I’m sure that your common sense is really working and you’re thinking why in the hell did I listen to this guy to start out with but I’ve gone this far so I might as well finish the experiment. So now that you’re mounted up on the back of the legs on the chair it’s just like you setting in the seat of your saddle with the rear cinch pulled up tight. Now let’s trot your rocking chair a bit, so by bending your knees, lets bounce up and down like you’re trotting, for several minutes.

Now you’re starting to see the reason for the safety glasses; the staples that were pounded into your new hardwood floor are starting to fly in different directions and have broken the big picture window in your living room and several have shot plum through the sheetrock on the walls and one broke the picture of you and the family on your last vacation in Mexico.

The last thing to happen is that the old rocking chair that belonged to your Great Grandmother just blew up into kindling and is laying in a pile at your feet. Well this is the end of your ride, so you might want to put what’s left of old Dobbin away. After cleaning up your mess you will notice two depressions in the floor right where the feet rested, about 8-10 inches back from the rope loops that held the front of the chair down. You’re probably thinking, why in the world did my good old rocking chair put those groves in the floor when it never did before when I used it?

Well I’ve rambled on way too long but I will get better and learn to make my reviews shorter but in the meantime I want you to study the two pictures at the start of this review real carefully and think about the two grooves in your hardwood floor. I might mention that the two pictures came from a popular horse magazine that I picked up at our local grocery store and I didn’t even look at it at the store because I knew that it would have the pictures I needed for this story.

Remember, all that you need to solve most horse related problems is COMMON SENSE!!!

The rest of this story will come in a day or two.